How much can you hike before losing muscle mass? I usually hike 1-2 times a week, anywhere from 2-10 miles each time w/varying degrees of difficulty.

I usually drink 20g protein/4g carbs and eat 2g protein/20g carbs both before and after hiking, with another snack in the middle if it's more than a two hour hike. I only hike for fun, as I already do 1-2 HIIT cardio and 4-5 weight training (per week) for either fat loss or muscle gain. (Looking to lose another 3-4 lbs., so fat loss/muscle maintenance for now.)

Is the hiking costing me muscle mass or not? Am I eating too much before/while hiking or does that sounds about right?

It all depends on the number of calories you are consuming and the level of intensity you are hiking at. If you are doing LISS, or low intensity, steady state cardio, you will have more a chance of specifically targeting fat because your body won't need energy as quickly as it would if you were doing hill sprints, for example. But either way, the whole hype about losing muscle from too much cardio mainly comes from magazines paid by the supplement companies which try to sell you more supplements to provent this atrophic response to cardio (mainly branch chain amino acid supplements or even HMB).

But then again, to a certain extent it is true. But you'd have to be really going at it, having high intensity cardio sessions 5-7 times a week for your muscles to enter a state of atrophy. When you see people that exercise that intensely, you see their frames sometimes as skinny but the truth is that they just have no fat. They burn it off quickly. I would encourage you to hike as much as you want but to make sure that you are getting enough carbohydrates. If you notice yourself losing strength (which would take a few weeks of this cardio for strength to decrease), I would suggest consuming more carbohydrates because if you don't consume enough of them, your body will not use the protein you consume to build and maintain muscle mass but use it for energy.

All in all, I would say no, you won't lose your muscles but if you go really intensely, bump up your carbs.

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